It soothes and blesses me. » All this I could have said, and much more, had I had my senses about me, and had I been a proficient in the German language; but I could not speak both from ignorance and emotion. I blushed, stuttered, took off my cap, made an immensely foolish bow, and began forthwith fumbling at the door-handle.

The reason why I have introduced the name of this siren is to shew that if tobacco in a former unlucky instance has proved my enemy, in the present case it was my firmest friend. I, the descendant of the Norman Fitz-Boodle, the relative of kings and emperors, might, but for tobacco, have married the daughter of Moses Löwe, the Jew forger and convict of Bonn. I would have done it; for I hold the man a slave who calculates in love, and who thinks about prudence when his heart is in question. Men marry their cookmaids and the world looks down upon them. Ne sit ancillæ amor pudori! I exclaim with a notorious poet; if you heartily and entirely love your cook-maid, you are a fool and a coward not to wed her. What more can you want than to have your heart filled up? Can a duchess do more? You talk of the difference of rank and the decencies of society. Away, sir, love is divine, and knows not your paltry, worldly calculations. It is not love you worship, O heartless, silly calculator! it is the interest of thirty thousand pounds in the three per-cents, and the blessing of a genteel mother-in-law in Harley Street, in the ineffable joy of snug dinners, and a butler behind your chair. Fool, love is eternal, butlers and mothers-in-law are perishable you have but the enjoyment of your three per-cents for forty years; and then, what do they avail you? But if you believe that she whom you choose, and to whom your heart clings, is to be your soul's companion, not now merely but for ever and ever; then what a paltry item of money or time has deterred you from your happiness, what a miserable penny-wise economist you have been!

:

And here, if, as a man of the world, I might be allowed to give advice to fathers and mothers of families, it would be this young men fall in love with people of a lower rank,

ENGLISH REVIEW.

and they are not strong enough to resist the dread of disinheritance, or of the world's scorn, or of the cursed tyrant gentility, and dare not marry the woman they love above all. But if prudence is strong, passion is strong too, and principle is not, and women (Heaven keep them!) are weak. We all know what happens then. Prudent papas and mammas say, George will sow his wild oats soon, he will be tired of that odious woman one day, and we'll get a good marriage for him: meanwhile it is best to hush the matter up and pretend to know nothing about it.. But suppose George does the only honest thing in his power, and marries the woman he loves above all; then what a cry you have from parents and guardians, what shrieks from aunts and sisters, what excommunications and disinheriting! « What a weak fool George is! » say his male friends in the clubs; and no hand of sympathy is held out to poor Mrs. George, who is never forgiven, but shunned like a plague, and sneered at by a relentless pharisaical world until death sets her free. As long as she is unmarried, avoid her if you will; but as soon as she is married, go! be kind to her, and comfort her, and pardon and forget, if you can! And lest some charitable people should declare that I am setting up here an apology for vice, let me here, and by way of precaution, flatly contradict them, and declare that I only would offer a plea for marriage.

But where has Minna Löwe been left during this page of disquisition? Blushing under the vine-leaves positively, whilst I was thanking my stars that she never became Mrs. George Fitz-Boodle. And yet who knows what thou mightst have become, Minna, had such a lot fallen to thee? She was too pretty and innocent-looking to have been by nature that artful, intriguing huzzy that education made her, and that my experience found her. The case was simply this, not a romantical one by any means.

At this very juncture, perhaps, it will be as well to pause, and leave the world to wait for a month until it learns the result of the loves of Minna Löwe and George Fitz-Boodle. I bave other tales still more interesting in store; and though I

bave never written a line until now, I doubt not before long to have excited such a vast sympathy in my favour, that I shall become as popular as the oldest (I mean the handsomest) of living authors, and most print-publishers, desirous of taking my portrait, may as well, therefore, begin sending in their proposals to Mr. Nickisson; nor shall I so much look to a high remuneration for sitting (egad! it is a frightful operation), as to a clever and skilful painter, who must likewise be a decently bred and companionable person.

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Nor is it merely upon matters relating to myself (for egotism I hate, and the reader will remark that there is scarcely a single I in the foregoing pages) that I propose to speak. Next month, for instance (besides the continuation of my own and other people's memoirs), I shall acquaint the public with a discovery which is intensely interesting to all fathers of families I have in my eye three new professions which a gentleman may follow with credit and profit, which are to this day unknown, and which, in the present difficult times, cannot fail to be eagerly seized upon.

Before submitting them to public competition, I will treat privately with parents and guardians, or with young men of good education and address; such only will suit.

G. S. F. B.

DANIEL DE FOE.

If Criticism, in its difficult task of arranging the precedence of the great names whose writings have won for them an immortal and imperishable name, could adopt as its sole standard or measure of comparative eminence, the degree of influence produced by an author upon his own or succeeding ages, or the extent to which his works have been diffused over various and remote countries, De Foe would vindicate for himself a pedestal in the Temple of Fame little, if at all, lower than that which the universal consent of civilized mankind has so justly conceded to Cervantes.

If, in addition to this, suffering and virtue, that noblest heroism which enables its possessor to support unmerited persecution, obloquy, and sorrow, that lofty and divine spirit which, disregarding, with a calm and patient dignity «the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,» awaits the distant time when party rage and personal malignity shall have passed away, and Posterity shall have learned the lesson, so rarely understood by a contemporary age, to understand the Work of Genius, and that still more difficult lesson to Man in the abstract, as it is to Man the individual, the lesson of Gratitude-if Criticism might found her judgments upon these data, the Author of 'Robinson Crusoe' would have nothing to fear from a comparison with that gentle yet mighty spirit

which created the half-crazed yet chivalrous Knight of La Mancha.

»

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The cell of Newgate, no less than the dungeon of the Inquisition, was a proof of that deep truth that the worldor at least the contemporary world knows nothing of its greatest men. It will be our endeavour, in the succeeding pages, to show that the comparison which we have just made, flattering as it may appear, and indicative of a too high admiration of the genius of De Foe; is not unjust to the memory of Cervantes: and in the discussion of our subject to devote our attention, at a length somewhat greater than usual, first, to a sketch of the Life of this great writer, and secondly, on another occasion, to an attempt to justify by a critical examination of his chief works, an admiration which may appear to some of our readers extravagant: and we are willing to hope, that our biographical notice of De Foe, by the pictures it presents of great and frequent vicissitudes-supported with invariable calmness-of a long and chequered life, devoted unceasingly to the good of his native country, and the virtue and civilization of man will be no less interesting, than an attempt, however imperfect, to investigate and develope the means by which he has acquired so elevated a place in the great Hero-temple of Immortality.

In no country perhaps so remarkably as in England has Literature been indebted to the middle and lower classes for its most distinguished names and although the Student may be inclined to assign various social and political reasons for a peculiarity which must forcibly strike him who has made even a superficial acquaintance with the biographical History of Great Britain, the great relative wealth, importance, and intelligence, of those classes, consequent upon the peculiar genius of the English Constitution, are perhaps hardly sufficient to resolve this problem, and to account for a phenomenon which is so striking, and in some measure anomalous, even after due allowance is made for the agency of that powerful influence.

That the envelopements of ignorance, which during the long burial of the dark ages, had enswathed Science and Reason,